Calling a C program from a Python Script

[Brad Tilley]

Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2004-12-09, Brad Tilley <bradtilley at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>Steven Bethard wrote:
>>
>>>>>for root, files, dirs in os.walk(path)
>>>>>     for f in files:
>>>>>         try:
>>>>>             x = file(f, 'rb')
>>>>>             data = x.read()
>>>>>             x.close()
>>>
>>>
>>>Remember that CPython is implemented in C, and so all the builtin types 
>>>(including file) basically execute C code directly.  My experience with 
>>>Python file objects is that they are quite fast when you're doing simple 
>>>things like the example above.
>>
>>I'm dealing with a terabyte of files. Perhaps I should have mentioned that.
> 
> 
> And you think you're going to read the entire file consisting
> of terabytes of data into memory using either C or Python?
> [That's the example you gave.]
> 
> Sounds like maybe you need to mmap() the files?
> 
> Or at least tell us what you're trying to do so we can make
> more intelligent suggestions.
> 

It was an overly-simplistic example. I realize that I can't read all of 
the data into memory at once. I think that's obvious to most anyone.

I just want to know the basics of using C and Python together when the 
need arises, that's all, I don't want to write a book about what exactly 
it is that I'm involved in.

I'm going to take It's Me's advice and have a look at SWIG.

Thank you,

Brad